Elizabeth M. Jakob - US grants

The goal of the Undergraduate Mentoring in Environmental Biology program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst is to recruit and prepare UMEB Scholars to be professionals in the broadly-defined area of Environmental Biology. The program includes (1) a recruitment plan with a focus on underrepresented groups, (2) opportunities for long-term independent research experiences with faculty mentors, (3) workshops in skills needed to succeed as environmental biologists, (4) extensive interactions with professional environmental biologists from a variety of fields, (5) peer mentoring, (6) mentor training and logistical support from the UMass community, and (7) a plan to disseminate the results of the program.

Long-term mentoring is known to be effective, so UMEB Scholars will be recruited early in their education and will participate in the program for multiple years. UMEB Scholars will be recruited from two pools: one group will be from three Massachusetts community colleges, and others will be UMass freshmen and sophomores. Community college students will transfer to a Five-College institution to complete their four-year degree.

UMEB Scholars will participate in a residential summer program. Each student will have a laboratory "home" and will conduct independent research with a faculty mentor from the Five-College Consortium (UMass, Hampshire, Smith, Mount Holyoke, and Amherst). Students will meet with environmental biologists to become familiar with a range of career opportunities. Workshops and field trips will help students prepare for graduate school or the job market. A peer mentor will live with the students to provide additional support. Each year, the summer program will end in a capstone day, when students will present their research in a poster session to which their families will be invited.

During the academic year, students in the Amherst area will continue to conduct research and will attend seminars and monthly meetings.

The potential for success of this program is enhanced by a supportive network at UMass that will provide extensive mentor training, assessment, and logistical help. The program will be managed by three faculty directors and aided by a recruitment coordinator. This program is well positioned to meet its goals of training a small but well-prepared group of environmental biologists.

Many animals benefit by learning about the spatial location of food, refuges, or other resources. A small set of species has been studied in depth, and it is clear that there is tremendous variation across species both in the extent of their abilities and how they gather and use spatial information. This variation suggests that examining a wider variety of taxa would be valuable. The goal of this project is to establish jumping spiders, in particular Phidippus audax, as a tool for the study of spatial navigation and learning. These spiders hunt for prey during the day and return repeatedly to silken nests at night, a simple spatial task. They can be studied in the laboratory and field, and rely heavily on visual cues, which are easy to manipulate experimentally.

In this project, two aspects of spatial navigation will be examined. (1) In idiothetic orientation, an animal keeps track of its distance and direction as it travels, much as a ship at sea does; animals that use this method can move away from their nest in a circuitous path, but then return in a straight line. Field observations of jumping spider behavior by other researchers suggest that they may be using idiothetic orientation, but data are few. In this project, we will conduct observational field studies of spider behavior to determine whether their behavior is consistent with idiothetic orientation. We will also conduct controlled laboratory tests of whether spiders use idiothetic navigation to return to prey. (2) Animals also use landmarks, or environmental cues that signal the location of a goal. Tests in the field in which landmark placement is manipulated will be used to assess whether jumping spiders use them to find their nests or return to places where they have captured prey. In the laboratory, manipulative experiments will provide more information about exactly how spiders incorporate information from landmarks, including whether they favor close versus far landmarks, whether and how information about landmark size is used, and whether and how information about the relationship between two landmarks is used. Taken together, these observations and experiments will establish jumping spiders as a new model system for the study of spatial learning.

DISSERTATION RESEARCH: Jumping spiders and aposematic prey: testing the ecological consequences of a context shift effect during learned avoidance

PI: Dr. Elizabeth M. Jakob
Co-PI: Christa D. Skow


Many animals, including insects and spiders, can learn to associate environmental details with events that are important to their survival, such as the location or palatability of a food item. Numerous studies have shown that environmental background cues can be stored in memory as part of an event. This can create a problem when an animal tries to recall an important association across a changing environment. If background cues change between the time that an animal learns an association and when its memory of the association is tested, recall of the association can be compromised. Previous work by the authors demonstrated that the jumping spider Phidippus princeps can learn to avoid distasteful aposematic prey, but lose the association when environmental cues shift. They propose to broaden their study by testing the following: whether relearning the same association after a shift is faster than initial learning, whether subtle shifts in vegetation across environments result in impaired memory recollection as do more dramatic shifts, if background environmental cues alone can be used to make beneficial foraging decisions, and whether it is easier to recall an association after an environmental shift when a food item is more unpalatable and forgetting becomes more costly. This work will contribute to the understanding of the ecological consequences of attending to background cues during learning, predator psychology, and adaptive strategies of prey. The principle investigators have a strong track record of mentoring undergraduate researchers, and will involve undergraduates in all aspects of this research.

Animals receive information about the environment from different sense organs, and they must evaluate and integrate these inputs in order to make behavioral decisions. Jumping spiders have four pairs of eyes specialized for different functions, making them useful models for studying this type of integration. Their unique principal eyes function like telephoto lenses and have very high resolution. The retinas are tiny but can be directed, via movable eye tubes, toward different stimuli. The less complex secondary eyes are specialized for detecting movement. In this research, the detailed function of each type of eye will first be studied by masking sets of eyes and measuring spiders' responses to stimuli such as video images of prey. The investigators will also build an innovative eyetracker to monitor and measure the movement of the principal eyes. Next, the investigators will study how the eyes interact, and how spiders integrate visual information from each eye type. The comparison of two spider species, each with the same eye arrangement but very different behavioral patterns, will provide examples of how this basic system can be modified for different purposes. The results will shed light on how specialized units in a perceptual system function together to provide information that can be analyzed by a tiny brain. In addition, the results will have implications for robotic design. The project will provide support for a postdoctoral researcher, a graduate student, and numerous undergraduates, and will enhance an international collaboration. Results will be communicated to lay audiences via a website in coordination with the American Arachnological Society.

All visual animals face the problem of distinguishing relevant from distracting stimuli quickly and efficiently. One way that visual systems accomplish this task is through selective attention, where an animal attends to a portion of the available visual stimuli at a time. Tiny jumping spiders have microminiature eyes that are nearly as acute as a human's and, like humans, pays attention and discriminates among visual targets. This project investigates how jumping spiders pay attention to and identify moving visual objects. The simplicity of the jumping spider eye and brain makes it easier to learn how the brain's neural networks "compute" visual movement and object identification, than in humans. In humans AND jumping spiders, selective visual attention is measured by rapid movements of their eyes to focus on targets of interest. This study employs an innovative eyetracker to measure the direction of a spider's gaze as it views video images. In addition, neural techniques are used to measure the activity of the spider's brain while its gaze is being monitored: specific parts of the brain respond differentially to particular images and sounds. Thus, it is possible to see both what engages a spider's visual attention as well as how different stimuli are interpreted. Understanding this elegant, miniaturized and extremely effective visual system will be of interest to roboticists and engineers, for whom micro-miniaturization of biosensors is a premium in small, self-autonomous robots. In addition, the PI will train a graduate student, a postdoc, and undergraduates, and will create videos for a project called "Faces and Voices of Science" that highlight the personal stories of researchers from different backgrounds. The videos will be made available online for teachers and professors to incorporate in lectures.


Visual animals face the problem of distinguishing relevant from distracting stimuli quickly and efficiently. One way to do this is through selective attention, where the animal attends to only part of the visual field at a time, through a process of saccadic eye movements and selective target scan. This is true for humans and at the behavioral level seems true for jumping spiders. These spiders are highly visual and are among the rare invertebrate animals that have moveable eyes. The PIs have developed two novel technologies that allow a comprehensive study of selective visual attention. These include an innovative spider eyetracker can monitor with precision a spider's eye movements in real time as they scan a stimulus image and the first electrophysiological recordings in the brain of a living spider as it observes visual stimuli. The eyetracker will be deployed to monitor eye movements while simultaneously recordings from single units in the brain are recorded. The PIs will thus test explicit hypotheses about visual attention, eye movements, and correlated brain activity. These include "bottom-up" stimulus-driven attentional processes by testing how different visual stimuli influence eye movements and neural processes in the brain, as well as "top-down" processes by presenting cross-modal cues and measuring eye movements and neural processes as the spider searches for relevant stimuli among distractors.